Newtonmas 2012
by Mademise
Summary: More along the lines of word-puke than anything else, spoilers for KOTW.
1. Chapter 1

"It's a white Christmas," Lenka whispers almost wonderingly, and then she laughs at herself, the sound mocking and cold as the screaming of the wind. She knows. It's a white every-day, and after all these years, the days do tend to blend into each other. There shouldn't be anything special about an appropriated pagan celebration turned into worship of the commercial.

But there is, and Lenka is remembering tinsel and trees and mistletoe hanging parasitic. She's remembering the feeling of fire under her skin and lips above it and crushing frozen water between her fingertips like she can scatter it to the wind, send it to a thousand graves like she never got the chance to for so many of her friends.

Lenka is remembering drudging afternoons in church, plagued by the screams from the crematorium directly below, and Lenka is remembering looking to the sky and seeing a myriad miracles mapped out in the shapes of crystals formed from one of the most basic facts of her existence that is still nothing but clever air.

It's a white Christmas, and there is no church here, no mistletoe and ash. But Lenka stares out at the snow, and she remembers.

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**A/N: I don't know if I'm going to try and tie these together or just leave them as general Winter-y things that can occasionally be summed up as 'sad girl in snow'. All things considered, it probably won't entirely be crackfic. Probably.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 1, 2012.**


	2. Chapter 2

"I would burn like so much paper if you brought that too near," the Sea-Hag offers wryly. "Paper dried out over fire, roasted to crackling, ready to be consumed. I'd be dead in a moment, ash in a few more. Would float on the waters and skim through the air and be lodged in the dirt of the earth, all for a tiny little flame."

"That's amazing," Clarabelle says distantly, staring still at the flickering light of the candle, and it shines hollowly in the dark of her eyes where they give way to emptiness. "Really a moment?"

"Really a moment," the Sea-Hag confirms. "I'd be safe if I hid from you, for a given value of safe, if I stayed in the depths. The fire could never reach into them. But no matter how soon I had been in the water, no matter how drenched my being, if I were to surface, I would be nothing."

"It's a good thing I don't want you to burn, then," Clarabelle says thoughtfully. "That would be inconvenient, if you had to hide."

"I could never hide from you," the Sea-Hag answers. "I'd surface and burn for you in an instant. Every time."

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**A/N: And, uh, this counts as a Christmas-y one because the candle in question's an advent candle Clarabelle's stolen from the Sanctuary because she hates the institution that is Christianity and she thought this would be a nice re-purposing.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 2, 2012.**


	3. Chapter 3

Kitana knows how to reshape the world to her own tastes. She knows how to manipulate minds and weigh the dice and distract the deities that govern her luck and her life for long enough to slip out the door when things go badly enough. She can talk her way out of anything, or at least stand there and be glorious and beautiful and worth obeying.

So this is kind of not fun at all, because she cannot rearrange the atoms of the prison, nor can she talk her way through stone. She who has been surrounded by admirers all her life is alone.

It stings like the venom she'd bled from her own tongue so many times, stings like the bitter of regret she'd never tasted until now. Solitude has soured for her, and the sweetness of victory is long out of her hands.

She's lost track of time here, though she should never have. She's aging and that's a shock because you think you're immortal when you're young and for a small part of her forever, she had been.

She's not now, and the moments blend into minutes into hours into days, and every winter is a shock.

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**A/N: I haven't really written much about Kitana yet, but I think I'm looking forward to it.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 6, 2012.**


	4. Chapter 4

Tanith Low watches as the houses burn and she thinks about the fire in the hearth in the house she had inhabited once, with her parents and her brother, and the blossoming of the magic that was routing its way through her every system, hard-wiring itself into her being. She takes a moment to appreciate how comfortable she is with it now, after so many years of angst and anguish over it, and she goes back to glorying in destruction.

She does that quite a lot, these days.

Certainly, companionship had been nice, over all those years, in one form or another – family, friends, lovers. But now the weather's taken a turn for the devastatingly cold, and she is solitary but for the comfortable hum of her mind and the beat of her pulse and the strength coiled in her substance, and watching the world fall apart is better than being the only dysfunctional thing within it. Sure, she's falling, but she'll bring everything else down along with her.

That's Tanith through and through, of course it is, because these houses aflame might as well be the one she left behind burning in her teens, fire spilling from the hearth.

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**A/N: A very merry Newtonmas to those who celebrate it, and a joyous anniversary of birth to those others who mark it on this day.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 25, 2012.**


	5. Chapter 5

Darquesse doesn't believe in gods. She thinks they exist, maybe, in some form or another, certainly much more vulnerable than their worshippers would ever have you think, but she doesn't believe in them.

After all, she's practically one of them.

It's got something to do with power, she knows. It's something to do with walking like you have the right to gut the world, something to do with holding the knife like you could cast it away from you and still win without really trying, something to do with glaring like you're the only thing allowed to exist. It's something to do with being the only thing worth believing in.

With all that in mind, she doesn't much mind the prison she's in, because she's practically a deity and it would take a fool to try to trap a God, so it's her home instead, where she will take root and fester and wound like it's her birthright. She looks through eyes she took, never stole because you cannot steal what is already yours, and she bides her time. Gods have no care for time, remain thereby unaffected.

Darquesse doesn't believe in Gods, but she is one all the same.

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**A/N: I can make no promises, but I am optimistic about getting caught up with these by the end of the year.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 25, 2012.**


	6. Chapter 6

Clarabelle has escaped into the cemetery and she thinks she might have forgotten how to read somewhere down the long, weary road she has trod to reach this point in her existence, because the tombstones are scratched with gibberish.

It seems odd, to look at them so and to know so much nothing about them. They're not like people, who she can figure out in an instant, but like puzzles. They are blank pages and her mind fills them in.

Clarabelle's skin crawls as she stands there caught in the long rows and columns that organize the graves, the corpses, the _cadavers_, and she can't have forgotten to read after all, because suddenly she's surrounded by the family she's lost, the friends she's thrown away (_limp, boneless, broken dolls_), the strangers she never let see another sun. She is frozen into place because something in her head has clicked and she can sort through so much more than just humans right now.

It could have been a transcendent moment, the start of a religion, a crisis, a cleansing of the world. It could have been, if only Clarabelle had not found herself shackled to the ground by nothing at all.

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**A/N: I think I possibly will forever have a certain fondness for Clarabelle.**

**~Mademise Morte, December 25, 2012.**


End file.
